Sparks Like Stars: A Novel

Part of what adds to the trauma that is elsewhere a theme in the novel is the historical context of Afghanistan as a country that has found itself at the center of violent imperial conflict throughout its existence. Hashimi weaves a noble yet tragic history for this part of the world, which complicates Aryana’s sense of belonging after she, as Sitara, is torn away from the world she knew. Though the novel focuses on Sitara/Aryana’s personal trauma and healing, Hashimi grounds her protagonist’s experiences in the history of imperial conquest and exploitation, illustrating the ways geopolitical conflicts affect the lives of individual human lives.

Much of young Sitara’s understanding of her country’s past comes from tales told by her father and from spending time in the presidential palace of Arg. Her father reads to Sitara from the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, an epic poem composed at the end of the tenth century CE that relates Persian myth and history. In addition to lyrics from popular contemporary music and samples of the culture of Afghanistan before the imposition of civil war and Islamic law, her father also recites the poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī (c. 1207-1273 CE), a Persian theologian and scholar best remembered for his mystical poetry. This poetry serves an artifact of the beautiful and enduring culture of Persia, now Iran. The book of astronomy that Sitara reads in the opening chapter, the Arabic Book of Fixed Stars written around 964 CE, is based on the Almagest of Ptolemy, an influential Greek scholar who lived in Egypt in the second century CE, hinting at the centuries of Arabic scholarship that moved forward the fields of mathematics and science and contributed to the European Enlightenment.

The excavations at Ai-Khanoum, which took place throughout the 1970s, uncovered the importance of the town to the Bactrian Greek empire that survived after Alexander the Great had brought Afghanistan under his rule, and the ring that Sitara takes, like the town itself, exhibits a blend of native and Hellenistic Greek cultures. The fall of this vibrant seat of civilization becomes a metaphor and foreshadowing for the fall of the cultured, sophisticated, modernizing Afghanistan that Sitara was born into, where women wore Western fashions, young men like Sitara’s father gained educations abroad to bring new knowledge back to their country, and roads and other improvements enabled economic advancement. The ring symbolizes Sitara’s connection to her family and her birthplace, but it also symbolizes Afghanistan’s contributions to culture, art, and knowledge that are too often obscured by the way outsiders have intervened in its politics and history.

Hashimi hints at continued efforts by outsiders to seize power in Afghanistan, beginning by referencing the 19th-century British invasion through a Rudyard Kipling poem that Sitara works into her prize-winning fourth-grade essay. This incursion of the British Empire is a forerunner of the efforts by the 20th-century superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, to make Afghanistan an ally. Sitara’s father and later Clay argue that to the US and USSR, Afghanistan was a carcass they fought over during the Cold War, the hostile ideological conflict that arose from the US’s efforts to stop the spread of communism. (The Vietnam War, also mentioned in the novel, was likewise a war the US fought to attempt to limit the adoption of communism in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; Hashimi alludes to this conflict to further underline the devastating costs of these ideological wars on the countries and peoples that became pawns of European powers.) The image of her father and President Daoud standing beneath the tapestry depicting a game of buzkashi is a metaphor for how the Afghan government is being fought over by foreign nations the way the teams of buzkashi players fight to claim the goat carcass in the game. The US and USSR treated the Afghan people as pawns in their geopolitical chess match, but the effects of their actions on the actual Afghan people were real and devastating.

The impact Aryana feels from 9/11 in New York City illustrates another toll of ideological conflict, this time the conflict between Islamic jihadists who believe they are helping to stop the spread of Western imperialism and the anti-Muslim prejudices harbored by many in the West and fostered by US foreign policy. Once again, the individual human being, Aryana, suffers the repercussions of global ideological war. Yet the notes of modernization and rebuilding that Aryana sees taking place in Kabul when she returns exemplify the resilience of the human spirit, a mirror and metaphor for the healing that Aryana undergoes. Hashimi suggests that Afghan people have survived the rise and fall of empires, have resisted outside invasion before, and have rebuilt time and again. While the wounds and scars of the recent wars run deep, she conveys a sense of optimism—captured in the image of the maternity hospital—that Afghanistan can be reborn from the rubble.